I Was in the Room When Catalonia Made History. Or Didn’t? Or Did?

A few days after a defiant independence referendum in Catalonia, I met an adviser to Carles Puigdemont, the separatist leader of Spain’s northeastern region.

Despite a crackdown by the Spanish police, almost 2.3 million Catalans overwhelmingly voted on Oct. 1 for secession from the rest of Spain, so the time had come to declare unilateral independence, he argued. “You’ve always doubted our ability to put words into action, but now we will show you,” he concluded.

So it was with a sense of trepidation that I prepared for Mr. Puigdemont’s address to the Catalan parliament on Tuesday, alongside two Times colleagues, Patrick Kingsley and Jason Horowitz, assisted by two local reporters, Marta Arias and David Meseguer.

The Times was deploying significant resources to cover an unprecedented Spanish territorial crisis that had the potential to destabilize a European Union already struggling with Britain’s exit from the bloc. We were not alone. A record 1,000 media accreditations had been delivered by the Catalan Parliament.

For many outsiders, Catalan secessionism can seem baffling. After all, Barcelona is Spain’s tourism hub, a cosmopolitan city visited by millions who are oblivious to politics but fascinated by the area’s architecture, food, soccer team and spectacular location, wedged between verdant hills and the Mediterranean. But separatism has century-old roots in Catalonia, a region with its own culture and language.

For seven years, I have been monitoring the slow-motion train crash between politicians in Madrid and Barcelona — I even wrote a recently published book on the struggle over Catalonia. But nothing could have prepared me for the twists and turns of a day that ended in utter confusion.

On Tuesday, Mr. Puigdemont was due to address lawmakers at 6 p.m. He held a cabinet meeting in the morning, after which the government spokesman, Jordi Turull, gave a drab news conference in which he promised that Mr. Puigdemont would make everything “perfectly clear” before Parliament.

Around 4 p.m., I walked down the promenade that leads to the Catalan Parliament, where a crowd of separatists, including some farmers on their tractors, was already cracking open beers and looking forward to Catalan independence.

Once inside Parliament, I took a pew in the upstairs gallery of the hemicycle, reserved for the press and some dignitaries. Mr. Kingsley was stationed in a downstairs press room, from which he prepared draft articles for three possible outcomes, from “a surprisingly direct” declaration of independence to an improbable U-turn on secessionism by Mr. Puigdemont.

I asked Ferran Mascarell, a separatist politician and historian, whether Mr. Puigdemont was set to reshape Catalan history. “Well, for a historian, it’s always tricky to define ahead what is historic,” he said, with a wry smile.

Shortly before 6 p.m., some opposition lawmakers took their seats. They soon walked out, however, after being told that the session would be adjourned for an hour.

The delay prompted a frenzy by the news media, especially after some outlets alerted that Mr. Puigdemont had received a last-minute offer of international mediation. Our photographer, Samuel Aranda, who had spent the day following Mr. Puigdemont, confirmed that the Catalan leader took an important phone call around lunchtime, after which he appeared more agitated.

I walked into a meeting room with an open door to find a group of conservative Catalan lawmakers huddled around a table. “Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing the declaration soon enough,” one of my parliamentary acquaintances told me. In a corridor, I then bumped into Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, a veteran of Catalan politics who negotiated some of the region’s most important agreements with Madrid. The delay, he said, reflected international tensions between moderate and hard-line separatists. “Don’t expect anybody to bring out a mediator like a rabbit out of the hat,” he warned.

After conferring with Mr. Kingsley and our Europe editor, Jim Yardley, we decided to sit tight. That was a good call, because Mr. Puigdemont then delivered a perplexing speech in which he appeared to declare independence, before immediately suspending that decision to allow for “dialogue” with leaders in Madrid.

So what had just happened? Mr. Puigdemont’s closing statement left lawmakers muttering to themselves in bewilderment, while our team of reporters and editors scrambled to adjust the wording of our article on a shared document.

Second-guessing the moves of politicians caught in a game of chicken has never been easy. A year ago, Mr. Puigdemont told me over dinner that his one and only purpose as leader of Catalonia was to lead his region to independence and to fulfill a goal pursued since his student years. After that, he said, he hoped to leave Barcelona and return to the quieter life that he had enjoyed before, in his hometown, Girona. Similarly, Spain’s ever-so-cautious prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, stunned many observers with his crackdown on Catalan voters on Oct. 1, led by police wearing riot gear and, in some places, firing rubber bullets. But the fact is, with each and every round of this conflict, the stakes have been ratcheted up and the positions have hardened.

Shortly before midnight, Mr. Kingsley and I left Parliament, having filed a final version headlined, “In Catalonia, a Declaration of Independence From Spain (Sort Of).” Mr. Horowitz had already left the promenade, after sending us his account of how the supporters of independence were “kicking beer cans in frustration” after not hearing the magic break-up words they had expected from Mr. Puigdemont. It was the end of another long reporting day, but clearly not the turning point in Spain’s territorial conflict that had been anticipated. Mr. Horowitz made us all laugh with his good-night tweet. At least, he wrote, we had discovered that Mr. Puigdemont could also be “Fudgemont.”

Raphael Minder is the Spain correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The Struggle for Catalonia.”